


A brick in the wall

by QueenPotatos



Category: Free!
Genre: M/M, Pre Relationship, Realization of Feelings, more like characters study, with slight unrequired haruiku
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 19:02:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20440961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenPotatos/pseuds/QueenPotatos
Summary: Things between him and Rin feel so natural that he doesn’t have to think them anymore. Antics, routine, something that smells like chlorine and a bit of Iwami, the taste of salt in Rin’s tears, the warmth from his embrace; he knew them by heart, so much they had become part of who he is, who they are.Then it itches, the day Rin curls his arm around another neck. And it takes him a week or two to realize even the most unshakable truth in the world could be questioned again, and again, as Rin makes friends with the rest of the group.Haru (re)discovers some truth about Rin, and about himself.





	A brick in the wall

**Author's Note:**

> I am rusted.

* * *

There is _something,_ he can’t quite put his finger on what exactly, and that feels different on so many levels yet, no matter how hard Ikuya tries, he doesn’t see it, can’t grasp it and analyse. He thinks first it’s the environment, the fact that they are now swimming for Japan, that they can touch the cherry blossomed vest at long last, a life’s achievement reached before the age of 20 but it’s not. And swimming doesn’t feel any different either, nor did his times improve – or worsen, for what’s worth.

And it’s not before a week or two after the primitive change occurred that he realizes what’s troubling him.

It’s Haru.

What a fool he had been, not seeing it sooner – Hiyori smiles politely beside him as he speaks and spreads his heart content, not to hurt his already wounded feelings, but he probably thinks he’s an idiot. It has always been Haru at the end of the day, but Ikuya had had the false hope that he had reached past this point. It seems some things, when fixed too deep into childhood, can’t be taken away from the core of your whole being. They are the bricks of his basement, bricks he can’t pull out without making the house collapse and it’s okay, he is okay with that knowledge. Still, sometime it itches to go down, skip the introspection part and take that brick away, just to see what would happen-

No, he had done it, in the past, and the result had been disastrous. He looked back at Hiyori, still impossibly smiling – unshakable – and bit his lips on what he had almost lost.

He cannot truly explain yet but watching Haru these days feels like his foundation has being shaken, as if someone was trying to take out the brick that make the whole house stand so perfectly still and he was trying to find a new balance.

He wants to reach, to say it won’t work, that he have tried and drowned and he doesn’t want him to drown as well. He doesn’t though. He’s not sure he is welcome anywhere near Haru’s basement, and it’s something so personal and private he doesn’t want to risk it.

The more time passes the more it becomes obvious. Haru is drowning, slowly but surely.

“I wish I could do something.” He confesses, at night, to Hiyori, to his brother, to anyone he can think of and reach at this late hour of the night.

But even Natsuya doesn’t know what the fundamental brick is made of. 

* * *

Rin comes in and out like a breeze of fresh air, at least at first.

Because even from the other side of the Ocean he had always been _there_ – and by there, Haru still doesn’t know where exactly – in each of his race, with his texts, scattered phone calls and on other’s lips. Having Rin by his side is as if he had never truly left, but meeting him again on regular basis does feel totally different from before. Is it because they are now living their dreams? Wearing the same National Jacket?

They are sharing the same room. Sometimes, Haru wakes up feeling nostalgic about the double bed in Australia without knowing why. Rin is there, finally at arm’s reach and yet, he’s still so far. When he was aboard he had a rational explanation of his frustration – he missed Rin because he was, actually, not really _there_ – but how come the feeling still lingers now that Rin is as close as he can be?

Haru tries not to sigh each time Rin puts his arm on his shoulder, or the moment he takes if off. There are things that are so common to him, so fix into his life that he doesn’t mind them anymore, like Rin closeness, his laugh, his daily challenges. It is exactly how he had imagined his days to be now that Rin was back.

Not that he had put a lot of effort into this, into the projection of what their days would be the moment they reunite.

Things between him and Rin feel so natural that he doesn’t have to think them anymore. Antics, routine, something that smells like chlorine and a bit of Iwami, the taste of salt in Rin’s tears, the warmth from his embrace; he knew them by heart, so much they had become part of who he is, who they are.

Then it itches, the day Rin curls his arm around another neck. And it takes him a week or two to realize even the most unshakable truth in the world could be questioned again, and again, as Rin makes _friends_ with the rest of the group.

At first he thinks it’s stupid. He is being stupid, and childish, and jealous. But he had worked so hard, waited, they have gone through so much to earn this peace and small moment of happiness he thought were reserved to them. None of their others teammates know how much Rin went through to smile like this again, they ignore all of his past torment, his pains and sorrow, they haven’t tasted a single of Rin’s tears of sadness so they can’t know how precious every ones his smiles are.

It shouldn’t. Really, it shouldn’t but Haru finds out how ugly an human being can be, just by looking at them smiling and putting an arm on his shoulder and thinking they didn’t deserve it, they don’t deserve him.

Then, his dark thoughts are washed away with a toothy smile, or by the cold water on his boiling skin, and there’s nothing than Haru hates more than this ugly part of him when Rin walks in their room again, radiant, simply happy.

One night he dreams of the year of the relay. The first one. Except Rin wasn’t there. There was no relay, just a life in shades of grey. His old self found himself in front of the wall they built, and his brick was missing.

For the Team.

Haru stares at Rin’s hair popping out of the blanket. He extends his arm, but he’s too far, he can’t reach him, and suddenly it’s like the beds are drifting apart.

The brick becomes cracked.

Rin is luminescent; he brings with him joy and an energy as bright as the sun and Haru has been a fool – or perhaps, blinded by his own stubbornness – to think he would be the only one to notice, or to risk to fly closer to the sun with waxed wings. Now when they go out, it’s never the two of them. It has in fact very rarely been just the two of them but even when they were surrounded by their teammates, for a time Haru had felt he had a connection with Rin the others didn’t, the same string that made it possible to feel him in the next aisle when he was thousands of kilometres away.

The link that binds him to Rin. What is it? What is he? What are they?

Childhood friends sharing the same dream.

The answer has been sufficient for a long time, but now that Haru has grown up and had discovered that ugly side of him every human being has to deal with, he’s not so sure anymore.

“Haru?” Makoto calls him out because he has drifted again in a middle of their conversation. It’s not that he doesn’t care about Makoto’s students’ progresses, but he has others things to deal with and they seem – perhaps unjustly – more important. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” it’s a lie, but he couldn’t have known before the word passes his lips. “Yes, everything is alright.”

Haru remembers the times where Rin had only eyes for him, how insistent he had been with him joining the relay. He remembers also how it used to annoy him, more than anything else, to be shaken from his comfort place, from the still water of his bathtub, brusqued and taken from his peace to larger pool – foreign pools. Even when he lived in Australia, even apart their had only had eyes for the other, hadn’t they? He had told him he was chasing after him, that without him he had nothing to aim for, hadn’t he?

It was their dream, wasn’t it?

_‘Are you still chasing after your father’s dream?’_

Haru wants to swim in the relay together with Rin, and he needs Rin to want it as much as he does.

It’s perhaps what people like Makoto would call Fate, or something about the stars’ alignment or perhaps someone he hurt in one of his past life who wants to take revenge, but the question Natsuya asks him later this week resurfaces his most ancient and important scar the moment he needed it the least.

“Why did you stop swimming in middle school?”

Haru let out a laugh, irony works like a boomerang and karma just comes back to bite in the flesh; after all he is the one who quit without a single explanation and hurt people in the process, just after he thought he had hurt one of the persons who counted the most.

Rin quit, so he quit. Rin came back and started swimming again, so did Haru.

Rin smiles, so does Haru.

No, that’s not true; or is it?

“It’s because I hurt Rin.” He speaks, before he corrects himself. “Or, at least I thought I did.”

And the part of him who feels guilty, despite Rei’s words, despite Rin’s words, smiles and reassurance, this ugly part of him will never truly die.

Natsuya has just found the brick. And that Haru’s house is perhaps a bit tilted.

Haru has always worked on his own, and he doesn’t need anyone to function but Rin has always known how to make him react to everything he did. As if all his words, each one of his moves were aimed at him, and him only, and Haru with time has managed to accept this fact, appreciate it even. Take it for granted perhaps, like a lot of things when you’ve been told for so long that you’re a genius and you’ve done nothing to prove people wrong.

And so, Haru finds out, when Rin doesn’t smile for him, his lips remain still. And Rin smiles a lot, to a lot of various people and the bed is drifting further each time he wakes up and extends his hand.

Rin is already gone to his morning jogging.

* * *

The moment Ikuya puts his finger on, the trick becomes obvious. How couldn’t they see before? How did anyone miss it? He laughs, bitterly, part because he feels stupid again and part out of spite and jealously, something not so surprising when you find out the person who’ve been chasing after for years has always been chasing after someone else before you even had the chance to meet. It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, knowing he had never ever had any room, that the place he had so dearly wanted to occupy in Haru’s life had already been taken from the start.

But he understands now.

There were words Rin taught him which changed Haru forever, words marked on a brick, incrusted in his skin, words Haru had tried to transmit to them afterwards. It’s painful for a hundred of reasons to witness how Rin still changes him, changes the way Haru acts, talks, how he makes him smile almost timidly like he never usually does. It’s subtle, but it’s like seeing a defect in a drawing; once you’ve spot it you can’t see anything else.

Except it’s not, a defect, it’s what makes Haru glows. Or used to.

Their mechanic changed so subtly and this is when Haru starts drowning.

* * *

Except Haru never drowns – he can’t. Haru knows the water like the back of his hands. Haru fights back in the tempest and tames the waves.

* * *

One night he asks Rin out, because he had found words he needs to say and never did before. They walk down the park surrounding their dorms.

At first he thought of apologizing. One, because he never did – at least not for that – and second because he thought he would take his out of his chest and mind, and made him feel lighter. But he’s luring himself, he knows it won’t. There are wounds nothing but time could heal, and the worst were the one you inflicted to yourself. Because Rin already forgave him, because he had perhaps never held grudge in first place, it’s Haru’s journey to figure out how to forgive himself.

Their hands brushed past each other when they walk.

Then he thought about saying thank you. Because he really didn’t say it enough – and not only to Rin. Thank you for everything, for seeing me, for choosing me, for dragging me along with you, thank you for taking my extended hand when you needed it, thank you for swimming with me again, thank you for dreaming with me, thank for Australia, for all the happy memories, the laugh, the tears, the smile, the roller-caster that his life had become, thank you for getting him out of the still water and for just, being you. Thank you, for existing, and then he realized it is not all.

“You know this shoulder is only for your arm to rest.” He says. Cryptic, he knows, but this is really what starts it all and it’s oddly what still makes more sense to him.

Rin is perplexed as expected. He raises an eyebrow, kind of pouts, “What the hell are you saying again? Did you eat something weird? Waisted mackerel???”

“So it can only rest here.”

Haru can’t bring himself to look at him in the eyes after he says it. Because it’s as far as he can go to show his weakness, the ugly part of his heart that wants more of Rin, for himself, a Haru who doesn’t want to share because he had been too used to Rin’s unquivering attention on him and he wants it to remain that way a bit longer.

The walk back to their room is a silent one. Haru imagined it would be heavy and suffocating, but it’s not. Because Rin is smiling. And so he does.

“Remember, you stupid head. It’s you and me, against the world.” Rin whispers before he closes the lights. “Let’s eat Swedish fish for breakfast.”

Haru laughs, his fingers burn under the blanket where they have touched Rin. “Yeah, let’s do that.”

The bed never moved. Rin has always stayed at arm’s reach. But it’s still not enough. He wants his arm on his shoulder. He wants his finger to burn against his skin. He wants his words to penetrate under his skin and rest there. Haru stares at the red hair that flees from the blanket. He’s still too far, but at least now Haru knows why, and what truth lies under.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll think I'll continue this.  
You can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/doctor_queenie) or discord where I'm mostly these days


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